Ganesh Venkataramanan, Tesla's Dojo supercomputer project lead, has left the company, a setback to Tesla's efforts to develop self-driving technology. Venkataramanan has led the Dojo project for the past five years, and now Peter Bannon, a former Apple executive who worked at Tesla for seven years, has taken over as project leader.
The Dojo system is a supercomputer designed by Tesla to train the machine Xi model behind its self-driving system. This computer can quickly process the data captured by the vehicle to improve the company's algorithms. Analysts have said that the Dojo could be a key competitive advantage for Tesla, with Morgan Stanley estimating earlier this year that it could add $500 billion to Tesla's value.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company plans to invest more than $1 billion in the Dojo project by the end of 2024. Musk first revealed plans for a supercomputer in 2019 and officially announced it in 2021.
The Dojo is powered by a custom D1 chip co-designed by Venkataramanan, Bannon, and other important figures from the silicon industry. Venkataramanan previously worked at Advanced Micro Devices Incwork, and there are other veterans from the chip design house on the Tesla team. It is reported that Venkataramanan no longer appears in Tesla's internal directory, and at least one other member of the team has left. The specific reasons for these departures are unknown, but they dealt a blow to the expensive and technologically advanced project.
Tesla previously relied on NVIDIA CorpA supercomputer is provided to power its AI-based system, and Dojo will compete with products from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and IBM. In July, Tesla said production of the Dojo supercomputer system, which is manufactured by TSMC, which is also the maker of Apple chips, has begun.